Global warming is, first and foremost, a challenge to the moral imagination. Nothing in our history or experience prepares us for contemplating, much less acting upon, our new relationship to a planet that has been utterly transformed in a short period of time.
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ReImagine a Greater Cleveland
Issues of vacancy, abandonment and foreclosure have had a profound effect on the well-being of the nation's neighborhoods and residents. These negative forces have mobilized community development professionals and policymakers in Cleveland to develop innovative efforts to turn the tide and fight for our neighborhoods.
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Great analysis of Capital BikeshareMay 8 2012 - 3:03pm Marc Lefkowitz
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Second life for AstroTurfApr 24 2012 - 10:41am Marc Lefkowitz
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Are food deserts just a mirage?Apr 18 2012 - 12:42pm Marc Lefkowitz
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More details on Pop Up RockwellApr 17 2012 - 11:28am Marc Lefkowitz
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Bike to work dayApr 16 2012 - 11:21am Marc Lefkowitz
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Farmer's market local food access grants availableApr 16 2012 - 11:17am Marc Lefkowitz
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Univ. Circle / Bike To Work day...Apr 16 2012 - 9:22am litolpea
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SmartHome sellsApr 12 2012 - 3:07pm Marc Lefkowitz
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Akron inks deal for mixed use infillApr 12 2012 - 3:03pm Marc Lefkowitz
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that's a reliefFeb 13 2012 - 10:28pm Marc Lefkowitz
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Marc Lefkowitz's Blog
Where's the vision for a reclaimed West Shoreway?
Looking for some advice on converting an urban highway, like Cleveland's West Shoreway, into a boulevard that provides a vibrant neighborhood more room for growth?
Peter Park, former Planning Director of Denver now a professor at Harvard, shares this insight from the $25 million removal of Milwaukee’s 1960s-era Park East Freeway in 2002, which opened 26 acres for redevelopment and has become one of the hottest land valuation areas in the city:
“Establish a vision for what you want your city, town, or neighborhood to become. Prepare yourself; broadcast a signal to the private sector that you’re ready.”
The difference in Wisconsin and Ohio? Their governor wasn’t willing to fight it once Harley-Davidson saw it as the lynchpin for development, Park writes in the report, “The Life and Death of Urban Highways” which looks at highway removals in Milwaukee, Portland (Oregon) and San Francisco.
In Cleveland’s case, ODOT and the governor have thrown roadblocks at the West Shoreway boulevard project, from the standard stonewalling that it will slow down cars to its too expensive.
Cleveland Bike Week activities, bike counts, pop ups, bike parades, scavenger hunts and more
· Did you know Northeast Ohio’s official bike counts are being conducted this week? The region’s transportation agency (NOACA) stations volunteers to count cyclists and pedestrians at these 22 intersections (highlighted in yellow). NOACA bike planner Marc Von Allmen explains why it’s important that you roll by and get counted: “It can help us to determine what factors have a correlation with high rates of biking and walking. It helps us to more effectively prioritize limiting funding for bike and pedestrian projects.”
· This is Bike Week capped on Friday by the big Bike to Work Day. If you want to ride in a group, find a meet up location and get connected on Bike Cleveland’s site and Facebook with hundreds of regular folks who plan to bike in to work. Free coffee is on offer around town, and the downtown bike station will have a big gathering with cupcakes, coffee, conversation (and a safe place to lock up and shower).
Large urban farms taking shape on Cleveland's east side
This summer, two moribund corners of Cleveland’s Central neighborhood will make significant strides in their quest to be large scale urban agriculture ventures. They carry the weight of expectation—that vacant land is more fertile than assumed, that it can elevate heroes in overalls with dirt under their fingernails.
On Monday, May 21, fruit trees will be planted and a massive sign forged in steel will frame a gateway park to a farm taking shape on residential land gone to seed at Kinsman Road and E. 81st Street.
A loose collaboration between two local businessmen who gained the support of Milwaukee’s inner-city agriculture pioneer, Will Allen, and OSU Extension—which has trained hundreds of Cleveland residents to grow food and sell it at farmer’s markets—continue to carve out plans to convert 28 acres of abandoned property into a farm operation with plots for rent.
Streetsblog founder: Cleveland is built for more TOD
Streets that attract people will always be at odds with roads that move cars, even in the most walkable city in the U.S. That doesn’t mean you give up the balance between the two. This is the core messages of Mark Gorton, an entrepreneur and bike commuter who grew tired of New York’s unsafe streets.
He told a City Club audience last evening that Cleveland can easily follow the example of New York where a progressive transportation department is introducing tactical urbanism—protected bike lanes, crosswalks, refuge islands, and pedestrian-only streets like Broadway in Times Square – with an eye on a balanced city, one that moves cars – if need be, a bit slower — and provides safe and attractive streets for people.
After launching successful tech firms, Gorton founded a number of online media outlets, Streetsblog being the most recognizable, to spread the word to a growing audience of people who “don’t aspire to live a suburban lifestyle”. Streetsblogs have expanded to a half-dozen cities, including Cleveland, where writers sound off on what Gorton describes as “the problem of living with cars in cities…where unintended consequences (include) the degradation of its living environment.”
Cleveland's rebound is real this time
· Sheep will graze the vacant lots in Cleveland’s St. Clair-Superior area. You’re reading this right – the neighborhood non-profit group is partnering up with a local farm, trucking in sheep to trim the verge au naturale. They still need volunteer shepherds. No, seriously.
· Thousands of kids in Cleveland and Akron's west suburbs are riding their bikes to school this month as part of the Bike to School Challenge. “It is an awe-inspiring sight to see hundreds of bicycles parked in front of these schools,” said Scott Cowan, owner of Century Cycles bicycle stores in Rocky River and Medina, which organizes and sponsors the challenge for the schools. “It sends a powerful message about the huge impact youth can have on the community with the simple act of riding a bike.”
· As more Clevelanders discover riding a bike can be a fun, healthy way to get around, the city is responding with legislation intended to boost safety. This week, Cleveland City Council considers measures like requiring drivers to give bicyclists at least three feet of clearance space.
Is Cleveland ready for bike share?
Bike share is a sustainable transportation idea that is coming of age in America. Unlike some more hard-core issues, like expanding bike lanes, bike share is exciting a wider audience to consider riding a bike in their city.
The origins of modern bike share—a flexible rent and return service —can be traced to city-led programs in Paris and Washington. Images of Paris and D.C.'s bike share whipped up a frenzy that led to a dozen U.S. bike share programs starting up in the last few years. Again, these are bikes that are checked out one place with a credit card swipe and returned to another self-serve station at or near your destination.
Bike share confirms that city dwellers plus congestion and the inconvenience of parking set up well for a bike-when-you-need-it situation. Even in car-loving America, bikes suddenly become attractive when convenience and coolness are mixed in with a dose of tech.
And now, bike share is spreading beyond big and warm-climate cities, with Minneapolis, Denver and Chicago starting or running programs.
Looking for lessons as $6M urban bike way breaks ground
· Access for All was the bike advocacy campaign that won a $6 million makeover for biking and walking from Tremont to downtown Cleveland. The first stage—bike lanes on Abbey Avenue— breaks ground this month. What lessons can bike advocates take from the campaign? For example, is it important to recognize that accepting compromise—from ODOT to build a new bike connection including a new Lorain-Carnegie bike path—can lead to the right outcome - better transportation options in Cleveland?
Gary Toth of Project for Public Spaces offers a good take away for bike advocates—define the problem (not the solution). For example, the problem— safe and convenient cycling and walking was not a good option between Tremont-Ohio City and downtown. While the campaign initially focused on the solution, a bike path on the Innerbelt Bridge, the campaign was flexible enough to recognize that ODOT’s compromise was an acceptable solution, and because of that we have hope for more success in the future.
As Cleveland designs Complete and Green Streets, a former DOT engineer offers direction
“The era of single-serve funding is over,” Gary Toth, Project for Public Spaces Director of Transportation Initiatives, declared last week in a room full of Cleveland traffic engineers and construction managers. An engineer for the New Jersey Department of Transportation in the 1970s and 80s, Toth understands the grey area and trepidation that Cleveland's Complete and Green Streets legislation represents for the men and women around the table.
Cities like Cleveland are discovering that they can create more value in this tumultuous funding landscape, he assured, when items like bike lanes are baked in to the design.
“Other cities are clamoring to do what you’ve done with Euclid Avenue.”
That clamor is driving some 280 cities who adopted Complete Streets laws, which consider the comfort of a range of 'users'—seniors, kids, walking with assistance or
who bike rarely.
Cleveland is one of the newer members to the club. It makes it all the more impressive that it managed to build the Euclid Corridor in 2008 without a local (or national) complete streets mandate.
Where's the next Euclid Corridor?
For the past year and a half, the massive Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium has chewed over what we need to do differently as a 12-county region. There are a plenty of smart people in the room who can speak at length about how our current low density, high-energy pattern of development is the cause of so much damage to the environment and our health. They can even identify what needs to change in order for us to act intentionally and grow in ways that are more efficient and attractive.
Is it possible that the members of the Consortium will take these lessons from the past, create a new vision and inspire Northeast Ohio to act on it? That’s the four million dollar question.
NEOSCC is an assemblage of government and NGO officials and planners, most of whom work for institutions responsible for our region’s makeup today. Some more than others are products of a line of thinking that has brought us to where our current transportation, housing and air and water quality are degrading not improving.
What's cool about Cleveland's pop up complete and green street
A complete and green street demonstration went live in Cleveland over the weekend. If you are downtown this week, stroll or bike over to Rockwell Avenue (behind the Main Cleveland Public Library) and check out the handiwork of Cleveland Urban Design Center students.
Test-ride the cycle track, which is a buffered two-way bike lane. You can see what it feels like to bike on a Cleveland street separated from traffic (by a strip of turf and handsome 2-ft. x 4-ft. planters). Take a seat on a BiFi bench, designed to absorb rain water below you with plants and a bioswale system from local firm, Filtrexx. The students did a top-notch job recycling wood palettes and rigging them up WiFi hotspots.
In all, this is the kind of creative spark Cleveland needs to see. It signals that streets are places of innovation; challenging what we assume is sacrosanct. The public right of way is not that hard to re-imagine as people friendly. With a few thousand dollars, a hard working crew given the permission (or not) can reshape the road even in the heart of Cleveland so that bikes, pedestrians and creative loafing (or ideation if you’d rather) belong.
This site is inspired by the memory of Richard Shatten, a former board member of EcoCity Cleveland,
who pushed Northeast Ohio to think strategically about regionalism and sustainability.
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